West Virginia Backroads

Some of the information I am gathering from my personal files is explained by Pshycologist Dr. John Breeding in these YouTube video’s.

Dr. Breeding will explain why it is so important to take a deep breath and make informed choices for your child.

    

Being that I have such a large collection of documents, it will be almost impossible for me to share all of it with you.  I’m still working on the best way to present the most relevant information. While I continue to work on that I thought I would share some of the information I found available on the internet.

The picture above is from the National Institute of Mental Health.  These images produced by positron emision tomography
     (PET) show differences between an adult with Attention deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (right) and an adult free of the disease (left).

The following statements taken from the NIMH site lead me to wonder ~Just how much do these scientists really know?

• Over the last decades, scientists have come up with possible theories about what causes ADHD. Some of these theories have led to dead ends, some to exciting new avenues of investigation

• Glucose is the brain’s main source of energy, so measuring how much is used is a good
          indicator of the brain’s activity level. The investigators found important differences between people who have ADHD and those who don’t. In people with ADHD, the brain areas that control attention used less glucose, indicating that they were less active. It
  appears from this research that a lower level of activity in some parts of the brain may cause inattention.

These are the same statements I read nearly a decade ago.  In my honest opinion I’m not so sure that they are even aware what the brain images mean. And this is how I got there.

• NIMH scientists demonstrated a link between a person’s ability to pay continued attention and the level  of activity in the brain. Adult subjects were asked to learn a list of words. As they did, scientists used a PET (positron emission tomography) scanner to observe the brain at work.

~ OK, so did the adult using less glucose to learn the words take longer to learn them?

~ Were they given a test afterward on the words they were asked to learn?

Personally, I believe that unless those questions are answered it would be impossible to conclude that using less glucose would indicate a impaired ability to learn. Perhaps the adult brain with ADHD did not have to work as hard and therefore required less glucose.

Now, how would these tests compare to that of 5-7 year olds asked to do the same?  Well, given the following information on stages of brain development in children taken from the Child Development Institute, LLC, I concluded they just don’t know.

Another recent study done by the NIMH seems to conclude what I suspected long ago ~ let them grow up!

• Brain areas that control attention were thinnest in children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) who carried a particular version of a gene in a study by the
  National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Mental
  Health (NIMH). However, the areas, on the right side of the brain’s
  outer mantle, or cortex, normalized in thickness during the teen years
  in these children, coinciding with clinical improvement. Although this
  particular gene version increased risk for ADHD, it also predicted
  better clinical outcomes and higher IQ than two other common versions
  of the same gene in youth with ADHD.

For more on brain scans and the results of similar tests that have been done for several decades, I recommend reading Biopsychiatry Illuminated, THE CANDLELIGHT PROJECT by Bob Collier

Also Consider:
 

Deaths from psychotropic drugs

FDA Ritalin Facts (PDF)

FDA Adderall Facts

FDA Conceta Facts (PDF)

FDA Dexedrine Facts (PDF)

FDA Cylert Facts

“Try as hard as we may for perfection, the net result of our labors is
an amazing variety of imperfectness. We are surprised at our own
versatility in being able to fail in so many different ways.” ~ Samuel McChord Crothers 

I admit it, I have been working. I haven’t delivered my next chapter as quick as I thought I could.

I have found many of the documents/evaluations that were made by my sons “teachers” and the “professional” pshyco-educational specialists.

To look at them after all these years, leaves me…angry.  I wasn’t angry then, why am I angry now?  Well, because I hold the current public/private schools responsible for much of the nonsense that is wrong with our kids in rural America today.

 

Mind you, I am digging through files (shoe boxes) that I have saved from 10 - 12 years ago.  I’m actually amazed at some of the things I am finding. I am more amazed at how people will/can twist things around to suit their need to feel justified.  It wasn’t obvious then…but it is becoming clearer as I put it all together now.

Why in the world would anyone save all that stuff? 

Well, I knew then…way deep down in my being, that a day will come when my son will have his own children and I will need to calm his own anxieties about the ignorance that takes place in the schools. I will need to show him that I didn’t raise a stink, I didn’t get in their face, I took what they dished out and (nearly always) let it roll off my shoulders.

To finish this for tonight I would like to reflect on a couple of memories I have about my own grade-school education.

My third grade teacher didn’t like my long bangs hanging in my eye’s so she scrunched them together into a ponytail on the top of my head that stood straight up.  I was so shocked by her anxiety over it that I allowed it to stay that way all the way home on the bus ~ fearing that the bus driver would tell her that I removed it.

The same third grade teacher paddled me and another boy so hard for a school yard spat (well, I threw him over the fence) that we both went to the hospital the next day and had to have x-rays for the black and blue bruises we had. (no lie..black & blue all over our bottoms)  I guess hospitals weren’t required to report abuse then.  Mom raised a little stink and I got a new dress from the teacher.  If I remember right, the dad of the boy I fought with got into a major stink with the school. Not sure how that turned out but I had a feeling then, it wasn’t so good. Neither of us were as hurt from the fight as we were hurt by the teacher.

Rest assured, things have not improved with the new laws since then.  Give me time and I’ll show you why.

During the summer before 1st grade I had found another Christian school and enrolled him there for the first grade.  For the most part, things weren’t too bad but my son was much more defiant than they approved of and he wasn’t allowed to return the following year so he went back to public school for second grade.

A few weeks into second grade I got the dreaded call to have a discussion with my sons teacher, the principle and a gentleman that over-looked the ‘Special Needs’ programs in the school district.  In all, the meeting was a high pressure discussion to scare and persuade me into putting my son on behavior medication.

    

The gentleman in charge of of the districts special needs children was adamant that Ritalin was safe and his son had been taking it for 3 years without any complications.  I asked him if he felt he was doing the right thing.  He stated that his son was able to concentrate on tasks at hand and that his grades had greatly improved.  I repeated “Do you FEEL you are doing the right thing?  Are you not concerned about the long term affects or possible addiction?”  He stated that Ritalin is not addictive, his son did not seem to suffer any side-affects and his son is not as frustrated with his school work, so he felt that it is the right thing. 

To that I replied that the long term affects of Ritalin have not yet been studied and I was not interested in making my son one of the millions of lab rats. As far as frustrations with school work is concerned, I believe that since he can concentrate on something he wants to do for hours on end, school work is simply not something he wants to do and therefore it is unlikely the frustrations can truly be drugged away.

The gentleman replied that my son would most likely grow up to be a social out-cast.  He would probably abuse drugs or alcohol because of his inability to “fit in” with society. 

The meeting and debate dragged on for an hour or more. I refused to cave into their high-pressured request for medication.  I began to research anything and everything I could find out about ADHD.

In the next chapters I will share some of the information I found, a nutrient that made a notable difference and my personal opinion about some of the “science” behind the ADD /ADHD reality.

Have a great weekend!

 “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” ~ Albert Einstein (among the many famous people believed to have had ADHD)